2nd March 2012 Archive

Serial entrepreneur David Jones, who has chalked up hits with SurfControl and Threatmetrix, now plans to fight back against what he calls the “muffin apocalypse” - the blizzard of offers for freebies or cheap extra goodies beamed to opted-in smartphone owners when they go shopping.

A “bromine explosion” in the Arctic back in 2008 has yielded a disturbing scientific analysis: the replacement of perennial sea-ice with younger seasonal ice could lead to mercury pollution in the Arctic.

A mutated version of the bird flu virus(AKA H5N1) created in a lab cannot be transmitted aerially between ferrets and is unlikely to escape and threaten humans, says the scientist at the centre of an ethics controversy over the threat his research poses to public safety.

If public authorities are subject to enforcement action by the Information Commissioner (eg, monetary penalty notice, undertaking, audit, enforcement notice etc), they should be prepared for internal reports into why the action was taken to become the target for Freedom of Information (FOI) requests.

How do you bring legacy-encrusted Windows into the mobile era? Microsoft's solution is to take all that baggage and place it into a compartment labeled desktop, while reinventing the Windows user interface in a second compartment called Metro.

OnLive may be better known for its cloud gaming service, but the advantage of running a heap of virtual Windows PCs on a server farm somewhere is that you can run Windows desktops on them as well as games.

The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) has quashed a complaint from a fanboi disappointed by Siri's lack of UK knowledge - and said the punter had above-average expectations compared with what it would expect from the "average Brit".

Microsoft has been cleared of wrongdoing in a high-profile court case alleging it and scores of other web companies hosted “objectionable content” - and even managed to get the plaintiff fined by the judge.

Top space boffins are keeping a close eye on an asteroid that could collide with Earth in 2040. Orbiting rock 2011 AG5 is about 140 metres wide and could come close enough to spur on a crack team of drill-wielding heroes to save the world.

Privacy advocates endlessly worry that online advertising companies track your every move in order to serve you creepily well-targeted ads. They needn't bother. After all, when was the last time this hyper-invasive tracking of your online behavior actually resulted in you getting a deal on something you really wanted?

The occasionally rumoured Top Gun 2 movie - sequel to the seminal* '80s aerial action flick - is to go ahead. Reports have it that the project, known to have Tom Cruise aboard already, now has a scriptwriter: and more importantly, the real star, the jet fighter to be flown by Cruise, has been selected.

Zynga may not exactly be integral to the survival of Facebook - which recently revealed it derived 12 per cent of its 2011 revenue from the online gaming outfit - but the fact that the company behind Words With Friends has built its own network might make IPO-ready Mark Zuckerberg a bit twitchy.

With Kinect Star Wars launching in just over a month's time, more of the title's features have started to appear online. Here's a titbit that caught our eye: a video showing a bikini-clad Princess Leia being forced to strut her terpsichorean stuff for Jabba the Hutt in a Dance Central-like mini game.

Managing the systems running in data centres and computer rooms is hard work, and that’s before the conflicting demands of users, managers, regulators and health and safety inspectors are factored into account.

Recently, we limited the length of posts made by commentards to 2000 characters. We did this for no better reason than that the 2000 characters had always been our publicly announced limit, and we thought that we should do what we said on the tin.

Apple will launch a subscription-based TV streaming service whether it has content or not. Probably the latter, if whispers vaguely wafting this way from the direction of negotiations are to be believed.

The ultra-aggressive pricing suppliers will need to bid so that they can win a place on the forthcoming public sector hardware and solutions mega framework may make it harder for resellers to get involved, vendors have warned.

Euro biz bosses have donated a cloud to top scientists at CERN, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Cambridge-based European Molecular Biology Lab (EMBL) - to accelerate their boffinry breakthrough rate.

Danish vulnerability specialist developer Secunia has released the latest beta of its Personal Software Inspector (PSI), and says it is betting on an open approach to security information to grow the company.

A team of Italian radio boffins – and one Swede – have one-upped their pioneering countryman Guglielmo Marconi by demonstrating a method of simultaneously transmitting multiple signals on the same frequency.